At Christmas dinner, long stretches of silence are only broken by the sound of clinking silverware. Today is the only day we eat on something other than paper plates. Today is also the only day we sit down to eat together all year. My brother, my father and I are the only people at the table, but there are four place settings. We still do not know how to talk to each other about the ghost at the table.
Every year, students look forward to going home for the holidays. Inside Pasquerilla East Hall, the doors are decorated with gaudy wrapping paper and tinsel. I watch the people I love bake cookies and sing along to Frank Sinatra’s Christmas standards. They make paper snowflakes and pray for snow. But when holiday cheer is in full swing, I can’t help feeling like the Grinch.
I secretly dread the holidays. I know when I come home for Christmas, it will feel like somebody died. And it’s because somebody has.
Nine days before Christmas Day 2012, my mother killed herself. I do not know how long it took for her to die. She did not leave a note. I kissed her goodnight, and the next morning, she was gone forever.
I did not go to school the next Monday morning. Many children didn’t, but for vastly different reasons. My mom took her life two days after 26 people were murdered in the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting. This is how personal tragedies are sometimes overshadowed by public ones. But this is also how a nation mourned alongside me on Christmas Day.
My mother loved Christmas. God only knows why, her retail job got notoriously tough around the holidays. But thanks to retail, she was also an expert at wrapping and giving gifts (which she reveled in). She loved to drive around town, admiring the lights and tapping her fingers along to Christmas songs on the radio. Her favorite part of the holiday season, however, was decorating the tree.
Every year, she would decorate our plastic Christmas tree up to the nines with her expensive collection of crystal ornaments. Some were purely decorative: an assortment of white pinecones and snowflakes, angels, trumpets, leaping deer, silver icicles, glass flowers, etc. Many were sentimental: a plaque with my parent’s wedding date, a 2004 baby boot for my brother’s birth, Mickey Mouse ears to commemorate a family trip to Disney, a white clay tree I made in elementary school, a tree skirt with silver glitter-glue outlines of our growing hands, etc. It was like her entire beautiful life was manifested in a single pre-lit artificial fir tree. 
In the years since my mother passed, my father would make my brother and I decorate the tree with militant precision. Each crystal had to be delicately wrapped and unwrapped with the utmost care and lined up on the couch cushions just so. It takes several hours to assemble and disassemble the tree every year. Sometimes I just could not bring myself to do it. It would never look the same without her, but every year, often after much shouting, the tree looks pristine. This is my father’s way of loving her — the way he keeps her alive.
My father would also drag us to church (a bi-annual occurrence) for Christmas Mass. Church had always made me uncomfortable as a kid. I never attended Sunday school, so I could never relax into the motions of Mass. I always lagged a couple of seconds behind the congregation, anxiously following the lead of my dad in the pew next to me. I would squirm in my seat, kneel to pray, stand, tug at my itchy dress and sit down again.
I’d like to imagine a winter when I wander into Christmas mass. The church is warm inside and filled with people. The smell of incense hangs in the air. The sound of the organ fills the cathedral and the choir starts to sing a song that feels ancient. I open my mouth to sing along, but I do not know the words. This time, however, I’m not ashamed. I open my palms up in supplication and turn my face up toward the rafters. The music reaches a crescendo, and suddenly, I am overwhelmed.
For a split second, with this song that is older than me or my mother or her mother before her, I let myself imagine heaven.
I am walking down a path in a sunny snow-covered forest of evergreen trees. Each of them is decorated in ice, crystal and silver. The wind picks up. The ornaments and bells ring in the breeze. Snow moves in gusts on the ground like an apparition. Suddenly, I can smell a hint of her perfume. Hidden somewhere, I know, is a tree with tiny 2004 baby boots and elementary school clay craft projects hanging from its limbs. There are tiny silver handprints in the snow around its roots. My mother is here, wearing a winter coat with a stylish scarf, standing back to admire her hard work. When she sees me, she turns and smiles. She was waiting for me all this time.
So this is Christmas, and when I look across the dinner table at an empty place setting, I am determined to eventually turn my eyes to the tree. Because, sure, the pang of grief is how our loved ones remind us they were once here, but I will let you in on a little secret: They are never really gone.
Claire Lyons is a senior at Notre Dame from Fort Worth, TX studying English and Political Science.
